Generally, growing vine-based produce producing plants using the lean-and-lower growing method involves growing one or more plant in soil or in planters that are spaced apart, with the vines or stems of the plants being vertically suspended, such as by twine. As the vines grow, a lower portion of the stems that are not producing produce are lowered to be generally horizontal and lie on a support surface, such as the floor of a greenhouse. The opposite produce producing portion of the vines remain suspended vertically. As the stem grows, the position of the vertical portion of the stem is moved along the row due to the continually increasing portion of the stem that is lowered onto the ground in a horizontal fashion.
A prior version of a lean-and-lower growing system utilized round tubes formed into a path with semicircular ends connected by straight tube sections. The system included multiple trolleys, each of which included an hourglass shaped wheel that traveled on a top portion of the tubular path, and included a downward extending rod, with the rods connected together by a wire to roll in unison. The system additionally included a single sprocket at each of the semicircular ends, one of which was powered by an electric drive motor. That system, however, suffered from performance deficiencies.